1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to network systems.
2. Related Art
Network systems are commonly used to move network information (may also be referred to interchangeably, as frames, packets or commands) between computing systems (for example, servers) or between computing systems and network devices (for example, storage systems). A network device (may also be referred to as a node) may operate both as a receiving node and a transmitting node to receive and send network information.
Various industry standards, hardware and software components are typically used to implement network communication. InfiniBand (“IB”) is one such industry standard used with computing systems and input/output (I/O) devices. IB is used to create fabrics that are complex networks, which may encompass hundreds and even thousands of interconnected hosts/switches/servers, all working in parallel to solve complex problems.
In networks, for example, IB fabrics, use Quality Service (QOS) for network communication. Typically, QOS is used to configure different service levels for end-to-end application communication paths.
One way to implement QOS in an IB fabric is to use independent paths for different applications. The IB standard supports such a mechanism by providing end nodes with multiple addresses and each address results in different path through the IB fabric. The IB standard specifies a maximum address space of 48 k for each fabric, i.e., one can have as many addresses as possible within the 48 k size.
This becomes a challenge in very large fabrics that may include thousands of nodes because assigning multiple addresses per node can quickly consume all the available addresses within 48 k. Hence, one is limited in the number of alternative routes that one can use in large fabrics, where there is greater need for QOS and there are multiple paths available fo communication. Therefore, the standard IE tools available for managing QOS are commercially undesirable.